The social origins of depression : By G.W. Brown and T. Harris: Its methodological philosophy

A preliminary assessment is made of the book from the point of view of ‘relative objectivism’, which is defined. The aim of the assessment is to decide whether it is worth while devoting the time that would be necessary for an assimilation of all the findings of a large scale and apparently thorough study. The eventual decision is against doing so. for five reasons: (i) the methods of selecting patients are open to contamination by the views of the investigators; (ii) the procedure for eliciting life events is unvalidated; (iii) the assessment of the severity of life events is based almost entirely upon the subjective judgements of a handful of investigators; (iv) the methods of analysing data appear to be selective and ambiguous; and (v) important conclusions often seem to be inconsistent with the findings. The causal theory of depression finally arrived at might still be worth considering on its own merits; but that is outside the scope of this paper.